The perps on the women’s ward
Apparently the hospital situation is as bad as ever.
NHS trusts are “gaslighting” patients over the inclusion of transgender patients on single-sex wards, a whistle-blower nurse has warned.
Dr Sinead Helyar said that in at least one trust if patients question why there is a male-bodied person on a female-only ward, medics have been told to “reiterate… that there are no men present”.
I don’t know why the Telegraph calls her a nurse and then a doctor, but anyway, we’ve heard this story before, and it’s pretty sick-making that it hasn’t been fixed.
Official NHS trust policy documents also compare patients who ask for single-sex spaces to racists and label them “transphobes”, “offenders” and “perpetrators”, she said.
Staff who raise safeguarding concerns may be threatened with disciplinary action or even criminal charges, according to Dr Helyar who warned that the NHS is influenced by controversial LGBT charity Stonewall.
That doesn’t sound like “influenced by” so much as “taking dictation from.”
Speaking in a personal capacity to a panel organised by parliamentary campaign group Children and Women First at the Conservative Party conference, Dr Helyar said that NHS policy is “formulated and enacted to the detriment of women”.
She said that many trusts, often under the influence of Stonewall, had developed transgender accommodation policies that “have failed to consider the rights and needs of women” and instead of equal treatment “prioritise male transgender patients in the very spaces set out for women”.
You can’t have “equal treatment” in this situation when the whole issue is separation. If women want to be separate from men while men want to be in women’s spaces, you have to pick one or the other, you can’t provide “equal treatment.” Equal treatment isn’t always the right answer to a question. The rich and the poor alike are free to sleep under bridges.
A spokesman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said that their guidance “aims to strike an appropriate balance” and the trust “strives to treat all people in its care and all staff with dignity and respect.”
No, that’s your problem right there. There is no “appropriate balance.” If I come to your house and grab a wheelbarrow load of your stuff, you’re not obliged to strike an appropriate balance such that I get to keep half of your stuff. Women should never be pushed to “balance” their right to safety and privacy with men’s desire to take that right away.
A Stonewall spokesperson said: “Trans women should be able to access dignified and high-quality healthcare in the same way as everyone else.
“Inclusive healthcare practices make us all safer and, in 2021, it should not be controversial to ensure that all LGBTQ+ people get the healthcare and support that they deserve.”
At Stonewall, we’ll continue to work with public sector organisations, including NHS trusts to ensure that their LGBTQ+ staff are supported at work.”
Blah blah blah waffle waffle evade evade. Notice that spokestwerp carefully never says what’s at stake. Dignified and high-quality healthcare, fine, but the issue is men insisting on being on women’s wards because they identify as women. If men can force their way onto women’s wards then where is the dignified and high-quality healthcare for them? Stress doesn’t help with healing, so forcing women to accept men on their wards is not high-quality anything for them.
“Why, transwomen have been using (women’s hospital wards; women’s restrooms; women’s changing rooms; women’s showers; women’s sports teams; women’s ___) for years and there’s never been any problems from them. Sigh…I’m afraid all the problems come from the cis women, many of whom are bigots. They can’t always be accommodated, of course. Where they go — well, not our problem.”
There are two classes of employee responsible for all this shit, neither of them adds value to the businesses/services that employ them, and the world would be a far, far better place without them.
Defund the PR and HR industries.
It’s possible that Helyar is not a medical doctor. I found online reference to her being a senior research nurse, so she may have a doctorate in nursing or another discipline.
Oh right I didn’t think of that. Derp.
At the UK Stonewall website at https://www.stonewall.org.uk/what-we-stand-for, we read:
“At Stonewall, we stand for lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, questioning and ace (LGBTQ+) people everywhere. We imagine a world where all LGBTQ+ people are free to be themselves and we can live our lives to the full.
“We are part of a vibrant global movement for change made up of LGBTQ+ people, our allies, families and friends. Since day one, we’ve fought for freedom, for equity and for potential.
“Over the last 30 years, we have helped create transformative change in the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK. Today, we have equal rights to love, marry and have children, and our lives, families and relationships are represented as part of the national curriculum in most of the UK.
“Our campaigns drive positive change in public attitudes and public policy. We ensure LGBTQ+ people can thrive throughout our lives by building deep, sustained change programmes with the institutions that have the biggest impact on us, whether we’re learning, working, praying or playing sport. We make sure that the world hears and learns from LGBTQ+ communities, and our work is grounded in evidence and expertise. And we’re committed to empowering people to create change in their own communities.
“We face rising intolerance degrading our hard-won rights. But we won’t be silenced. Not until all of us are free to be proud, free to be loved, free to be together, free to be who we are. Our work continues until the world we imagine is the world we live in.”
There is nothing there about the rights of those born with male genitalia to use womens’ dunnies and other exclusive facilities. Perhaps that oversight should be pointed out to them.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but over the last thirty years I cannot remember being in a single-sex ward except when I was in the maternity unit (the male babies don’t count!), unless I was in a room on my own. I think that, as soon as they had permission to have mixed-sex wards, the staff decided that trying to segregate patients was just one more headache to avoid and instead just put anyone wherever there is a space.
I should have mentioned that these were hospitals in the UK, Ireland and Australia; not just one country has stopped thinking about women’s privacy and safety.
tigger:
I was in hospital in England twice last year and the wards both times were all male. At least, there were only men there, I suppose that could have been coincidence.
These were probably non-typical wards, though, only about 8 beds? One was a COVID ward (long story, I didn’t have any symptoms but had to be in a COVID ward for a few days anyway) and one was a neurology ward. So they might not count.
latsot, I’ve mostly been on cardiology wards, which might explain why they were dominated by the male sex. I’ve often been the only woman on a four-bed ward, although larger wards have usually had several members of both sexes. It’s not that women are less inclined to get heart disorders; it’s just that we are less likely to be diagnosed, until it’s too late. I would imagine there are just as many women as men, in the mortuary, who died from heart attacks.
Huh. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been on a hospital visit to a room with more than 4 beds in it, and yeah, single-sex was always the case, there. When people talk about ‘wards’, I usually think of a series of such rooms connected to a single nursing station. (The ER is a bit of a different horse, of course.)
I think the one exception I can think of has been in the case of children’s wards, which might have more beds, specifically to encourage some socialization among the patients.
So as an American, I had no idea that you were talking about, say, a half-dozen to a dozen people who had to accept being bedded down in a mixed-sex environment, while dealing with the often embarrassing (or even humiliating) processes involved with health care. Fuck me running, as a guy, I wouldn’t want to be in a multi-sex room in that scenario, and embarrassment is all I’d be worried about.
When I was about 3 years old, I contracted scarlet fever, and was confined in the big Prince Henry Hospital for infectious diseases, in Sydney. There were no girls in our childrens’ ward, so it was probably boys-only. The kid in the next bed called the nurse one morning, and she came up and said “Oh Bobby, don’t tell me you’ve wet your bed again!” “No” came the answer. The nurse, very much relieved, asked him “well, what is it, then?”
“I’ve pooed it.”
That taught me the role of surprise and the unexpected in the scripting of comedy. Never looked back.
#5
“Today, we have equal rights to love, marry and have children, and our lives, families and relationships are represented as part of the national curriculum in most of the UK. ”
The conflation is breathtaking isn’t it! Gays and lesbians fought to have those rights with each other, trans people never didn’t have those rights unless they wished to exercise them with same sex partners, at which point it wasn’t trans that was the problem; it was being gay!